Rollup splits the Ethereum ecology, how do V God, Matic, Celer, etc. want to solve it?
March will be the highlight of Rollup's expansion plan. From the perspective of progress, various Rollup solutions are ready to go, and some solutions have been clearly launched in March, and the launch of the Rollup expansion solution will have a major impact on the industry.
However, due to the difficulty of interoperability between Rollups, this has caused a fragmentation of the Ethereum ecosystem, and it is difficult to achieve synergy between different protocols, and the composability that is very important to DeFi will also be fragmented. So is there any way to solve this problem?
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1. Rollup is ready to go
We have introduced Optimism, ZkSync, Arbitrum, and StarkEx, the four main rollup expansion solutions, here is a brief description as a background.
For details of the four Rollup schemes, you can click to view:secondary title。
Choice of different Rollup schemes and DeFi protocols
At present, each of the four main Rollup expansion solutions has attracted a group of ecological users, among which:
Optimism has attracted the attention of Uniswap and Compound, and even after the pre-launch of the main network, it has been deeply involved in the synthetic asset trading platform Synthetix.
Curve, StablePay, and GitCoin adopt or plan to adopt Matter Labs' zkSync solution as an expansion option.
Arbitrum, created by Offchain Labs, has been tested or planned to be used by several DeFi projects, including Bancor, Bounce, DODO, Math Wallet, Burgerswap, Hop, MCDEX, and Swapr.
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What is the progress of each Rollup expansion plan?
Optimism announced in February that it completed the A round of financing, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and will launch the main network in March.
Arbitrum started as an academic research program, and a patent was filed as the program entered the commercialization phase. The team recently stated that after obtaining the consent of Princeton University, considering that the project has entered the mature stage of the community, it will abandon the patent.Arbitrum also announced that the mainnet is in the upcoming stage.
Matter Labs, the founding team of the zkSync project, also disclosed the information of the A round of financing, “Union Square Ventures (USV) led the round, and previous investors Placeholder, 1kx and Dragonfly continued to participate in this round, in addition to zkSync Ecological partners participated in the investment, including Aave, Balancer, 1inch, Curve, Binance, Coinbase Ventures, Huobi, Loopring, Argent, MYKEY, imToken, Flexa, MoonPay, ripio, ZKValidator, CoinGecko".first level title
2. Rollup leads to ecological fragmentation
Most DeFi protocols are created based on smart contracts, which are deployed on Layer1's Ethereum and connected to their own Layer2 network through their own methods.
For users, deposit funds into smart contracts and start using these Layer2 networks. Smart contracts will record all transaction changes, and users can use them on Layer2 networks to improve efficiency and reduce costs.
But if Synthetix and Uniswap exist on different Layer2 networks, they may be in their own isolated islands, and how to interact will become a problem.
How to connect different scaling solutions and maintain the composability and collaboration that DeFi protocols are best known for?
In an online AMA in the Bihu community, Vitalik mentioned two problems that Layer 2 solutions such as Rollup need to solve:
Many applications in the Ethereum community like to call smart contracts, such as DeFi projects. However, the current ZK Rollup does not support smart contracts, and only supports simple applications such as issuing coins and trading coins. This is the first question. When we have Rollup with full EVM support, I think more users will move to Rollup.
At present, there are not many infrastructure ecology related to Rollup. For example, we haven't solved the problem of transactions between different Rollups. If I have some coins in ZKsync, how can I move them to Loopring? First, you need to withdraw the currency from the second layer of ZKsync to the bottom layer of Ethereum, and then transfer it to the second layer account of Loopring. If this is done, will transaction fees be particularly high?
Now there will be many user experience challenges (problems) on Ethereum. But I think after 6 months a lot of those issues will be resolved.
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3. Vitalik's Proposal: How to Realize Cross-Rollup Transfer
A few days ago, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed the idea of connecting different second-layer scaling solutions so that they can "talk" to each other to keep the DeFi protocol composable and synergistic.
Suppose there are two Rollups: A and B. User Alice wants to exchange some tokens on Rollup A for other tokens on Rollup B. Suppose there are two situations:
Both Rollup A and Rollup B can support contracts
Only one Rollup supports smart contracts, and the other Rollup only supports simple transfers.
In the first case, the community also has a proposal called"Hop: Send Tokens Across Rollups (Hop: Send Tokens Across Rollups)", see the address: https://ethresear.ch/t/hop-send-tokens-across-rollups/8581.
Vitalik's proposal is aimed at the second scenario, that is, if RollupA only supports simple transfer transactions, while Rollup B supports smart contracts.
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Basic Scenarios for Cross-Rollup Transfers
"Suppose there is a trading intermediary named Ivan (of course there are many intermediaries to choose from, here is just an example). Ivan has an account IVAN_A on Rollup A (he fully controls the account). Ivan also has some funds deposited on Rollup B in the smart contract IVAN_B."
Imagine the following operations:
Alice initiates a transaction to the IVAN_A account on Rollup A and transfers to the account on Rollup B: ALICE_B. (Alice transfers to IVAN on Rollup A)
What can Ivan do? He will send a transaction through the IVAN_B account, and send the amount of tokens after deducting the handling fee to the account of ALICE_B.
After the first step, the second step can be performed immediately. If Ivan proves that the difference between the second transaction and the first transaction is very small, then it is even possible to set rules in the contract to allow higher fees.
The "worst case" is that Ivan does not send tokens to ALICE_B as expected. In this case, Alice can wait for the transaction confirmation on Rollup A, and then obtain the tokens on Rollup B through other means to pay the handling fee for the cross-Rollup transfer, and then she can claim and obtain funds by herself.
According to V God's explanation, user Alice can complete it directly on Rollup B.It is only necessary to allow Rollup B to obtain the corresponding hash record on L1 before the previous batch of Rollup records, and then Rollup B can record the Merkle branch and verify it in Rollup.
In layman's terms, technical means can ensure that after user Alice confirms the transaction on Rollup A, she can securely receive the corresponding funds on Rollup B (after paying the handling fee), avoiding the There is a problem with the intermediary, resulting in the loss of funds.
No matter who the trading intermediary Ivan is, why others choose to transfer tokens to him, these can be ignored for the time being; the meaning here is that there is a connection layer to keep the funds deposited in various isolated Layer2 smart contracts in sync, and realize The function of transferring funds across Rollups.
For specific implementation details, you may need to understand the rules of the contract IVAN_B on Rollup B. Follow the settings below (truncated for ease of understanding):
If anyone initiates a transaction and sends a certain amount of bitcoins to the account IVAN_A (stored on Rollup A), the memo contains the information of the target address. Then, after a certain amount of time, they can send a transaction to the contract IVAN_B, which contains a proof of transfer, which can transfer the corresponding amount of bitcoins to the target address on Rollup B.
Withdrawals have to go through some delays (for example, 1 day) to ensure that the corresponding transfer batches and indexes can be recorded in Rollup A's Layer2 network.
in this case,
in this case,secondary title
Settler acts as a collaborative role for cross-Rollup transfers
Ivan himself also needs to perform internal settlement, after all, it is possible to run out of funds on a certain Rollup. For example, the user has been transferring funds from Rollup A to Rollup B, and needs to transfer the funds reserved by Ivan on Rollup B to the address specified by the user. At this time, transaction intermediaries such as Ivan need to carry out internal settlement. Therefore, the restrictions of this proposal will require intermediaries such as Ivan to hold a large amount of funds in their accounts in order to serve user needs.
Let's take the legal currency as an example, which may be better understood. If you transfer money from ICBC to CCB card, although the display on the ATM machine changes immediately, the actual settlement process is done once a day, and the actual funds are transferred to CCB only after ICBC settles. More specifically, It is carried out between the settlement accounts of the central bank.
Similarly, it is a similar operation to initiate a transfer transaction from Rollup B that supports smart contracts to Rollup A that only supports ordinary transfers.
Alice sends tokens to the contract account IVAN_B, and attaches the target address;
After a certain amount of time, Alice can get the funds back;
However, if the intermediary IVAN can provide proof to the smart contract IVAN_B, attach the transfer records on the chain and other information to prove that he has transferred the funds to Alice on Rollup A, then Alice can no longer get the funds back. At this point, the cross-Rollup transfer is complete.
So far, we have roughly understood the principle of cross-Rollup transfer mentioned in Vitalik's proposal, and only one of the Rollups needs to support smart contracts to realize it. The middleman IVAN is mainly introduced to support cross-Rollup transfer.
first level titlehttps://ethresear.ch/t/cross-rollup-dex-with-smart-contracts-only-on-the-destination-side/8778。
4. Hop's cross-Rollup transfer scheme
Above, we also mentioned another scenario: two Rollups, such as ZKSync and Optimism, both support smart contracts, so how to achieve cross-Rollup interaction?
Hop team member Chris Whinfrey posted a post on the ETH Research forum on January 24, introducing how Hop can conduct decentralized token transfers across Rollups.
The content is as follows:
The Hop protocol provides a trustless, scalable cross-Rollup communication bridge. Committed to:
Fast and easy cross-rollup token transfers
Can quickly exit from Rollup
Finally realize the function of cross-Rollup contract call
In the view of the Hop team, they provide a wide range of solutions to solve the problem of cross-Rollup composability through a two-pronged approach:
Create a cross-network bridging token that can be quickly and economically moved from one Rollup to another Rollup, or created on Layer1 to support claiming the corresponding underlying assets.
Use an Automated Market Maker (AMM) to trade between each bridge token and its corresponding token on each Rollup for dynamic pricing and rebalancing of liquidity across the network.
In other words, with the help of an anchor token (such as Bridge), it can be deployed on multiple Rollups, and it can also be deployed on Layer 1’s Ethereum network and support Layer 1 and Layer 2’s Bridge tokens on Rollup 1: 1 anchor exchange.
If the user wants to transfer 100 BTC from Rollup A to his or someone else's account on Rollup B, then the process is as follows:
First, on Rollup A, exchange the 100 ETHs into Bridge_A tokens through AMM, which is the bridge token;
After the transaction is confirmed, the Bridge_B token will be exchanged for 100 ETH tokens through AMM on Rollup B, and then transferred to the corresponding address on Rollup B specified by the user;
Since both Bridge_A and Bridge_B are the same tokens, they just act as a cross-Rollup bridge, and their ratio is anchored at 1:1. If the value fluctuates, arbitrageurs will carry out risk-free arbitrage and move bricks to even out the difference.
first level titlehttps://hop.exchange/send。
5. Are there any other plans?
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Celer's Layer 2 solution: in-place expansion
The domestic DeFi project Celer proposed a new idea called "in-place expansion". In-situ means that the DeFi project can continue to be in Layer1, and there is no need to go to Layer2 to deploy a special version. Celer's Solution--Layer2.finance, to achieve expansion.
According to the introduction of the Celer team, in this scenario, the user's assets are stored on the Layer2 chain (Celer starts from the Optimistic Rollup-based solution, and then expands and upgrades to support ZK Rollup), and then the user sends an instruction to tell the Layer2.finance protocol its own Operational requirements, specify how much of your own funds and which DeFi protocols to store in, such as Curve, AAVE, Compond and other DeFi protocols located on the Ethereum Layer1 network.
In this way, Layer2 acts as a command agent, and users can store assets + send instructions, while the specific business logic is still handed over to the DeFi protocol on Layer1 for execution. The commands of different users can interact with the Layer1 contract more economically by merging transactions.
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Matic Network Rebranding: Polygon
Polygon, formerly known as Matic Network, took another path and set its tone as a Layer 2 aggregator to achieve expansion in two ways:
Rely on the Ethereum network, rely on validators on the corresponding network, and support Matic Plasma, zkRollups, Optimistic Rollups, Validium and other schemes.
Establish your own sub-chain system and independent verification nodes, and be responsible for your own security. In this direction, the Matic PoS chain is currently launched.
The upgraded plan of Matic Network goes further. In addition to relying on the existing ecosystem, it needs to establish its own ecosystem independently, and it will take more effort. According to statistics, there are currently more than 80 DApps deployed on Polygon, covering DeFi, NFT, games and other fields.
first level titlehttps://polygon.technology/
6. Summary
March will be very lively. The mainnet launch of Arbitrum and Optimism marks that we are currently on the eve of the outbreak of Layer 2 solutions such as Rollup.Layer 2 plans to compete for users will become a major theme in March and the first half of the year.
And how to be compatible between different Layer2 (specifically Rollup) to avoid destroying the collaboration of DeFi? The several plans I have seen so far are actually crossing the river by feeling the stones. Vitalik's proposal, Hop's implementation, and Celer's creativity may be able to solve the problems they envisioned, but implementing DeFi call combinations across Rollups is still a big problem ahead.
On the other hand, the recent deployment of protocols such as Sushi on multiple chains may indicate another possibility, similar to the one mentioned in the Hop plan, with the help of AMM + the protocol’s own tokens, perhaps many The DeFi protocol will first try to open up the gap between different Layer2 networks and Layer1 internally to form a closed loop.
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References:
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/2HYIsxnUaovKYs19xQ_KbQ
https://www.trustnodes.com/2021/03/02/vitalik-buterin-proposes-cross-rollup-scaling-solution
https://www.chainnews.com/articles/872971457746.htm
https://hop.exchange/whitepaper.pdf
Disclaimer: This article is the author's independent opinion, does not represent the position of the Blockchain Institute (public account), and does not constitute any investment opinion or suggestion.
The cutting-edge trends of the encryption industry, the first-hand information of the blockchain industry, mining and analysis of potential projects, welcome to join the "Block Guest Space" carefully created by the Blockchain Research Institute, and capture 100 times coins with senior investors!
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